


while we all pretend to sleep

by pentipus



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King, Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Aliens, Eddie Kaspbrak Lives, Established Relationship, M/M, Road Trips, Soft Eddie Kaspbrak, The Desert, Weird Shit, van sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-21
Updated: 2019-11-21
Packaged: 2021-02-18 12:28:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21511066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pentipus/pseuds/pentipus
Summary: Richie hears about a town in the Southwest, Eddie takes him there.They drove across the southern point of Nevada over two slow days, traversing that jagged shard of rock and dust with the static from the radio as their soundtrack. It crackled on even as Richie pressed his hand between Eddie's legs, leaning over as they drove to growl obscene things in his ear. It was the white noise that played on as Richie jerked Eddie off in the back of the van, their bodies pressed close and hot.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Kudos: 22





	while we all pretend to sleep

It was meant to be a road trip, a there-and-back-again for Richie to stretch his legs, to see some familiar ground after being away from LA for so long. When the heat had got too much for them they moved back East for a change,  _ it’ll be good for us _ . But New York just made them mad at each other, Philly made them jumpy. So they went to back to Maine, of all places, where Eddie put down his roots, anchored Richie along with him.

Eddie had nodded when Richie suggested the trip,  _ Let’s go see how the Southwest’s doing, you and me _ , and had placed placating hands of Richie’s shoulders, against his neck. He’d kissed the nervous curl of Richie’s lips until the shaking subsided, muttering quiet words of solicitude into the hot air between them.

They planned a route that wound its way around the big cities, snaking between the bigger towns. The rural roads were wide and long and Eddie could see Richie settling further into the worn seat of their crappy rental with every mile they put between themselves and the lurking horror of Maine.

“There’s this town I wanna visit,” Richie said one day as they rested on the edge of a soybean field, straight brown stalks thick at their backs. “I’ve heard about it, this place back home.”

_ Home _ , Eddie thought.  _ LA _ .

“Sure,” Eddie said. “Whatever you like, man.”

They passed through a town that night and stopped for a drink in a bar with pictures of crop circles above the bottles of half-full optics.

“We saw those today, huh?” Richie said, indicating the grainy pictures with his glass of beer.

“Did we?”

Richie nodded. “I did, in the soybeans.”

Eddie nodded, peering up at the pictures. “What did they look like?”

“Like a sign,” Richie said, “pointing towards the Pacific.”

“That’s comforting.”

Richie grinned.

They drove away through the dark night after that, and though the pinpoints of street lights faded in the distance behind them, the glow of that human place lingered in a grey haze on the horizon for miles. Ahead of them stretched the dark of the plains, the black fields and the black sky and the spill of stars above them.

They stopped on the side of the road to rest, and when the van’s headlights were turned off the darkness was so enveloping that they could have been lost at sea. Floating among some black wreckage like La Salle, like Shackleton, like Smith.

Richie got nervous, his laugh edging into hysteria when Eddie had turned out the lights. He scrabbled around in the back and shuddered up against Eddie, whining, “I don’t like it, man, I don’t like it.”

So Eddie had pushed him down in the little space they had, shuffling until he was between Richie’s hot thighs, his legs up around Eddie’s shoulders, the tips of his toes brushing the grey roof. Eddie ate Richie out until he was panting, his arm thrown across his face, then he sucked him off hard and fast, swallowing the mess that Richie made. He rucked up Richie's t-shirt and pressed his cheek against the calming flutter of Richie's stomach, his breathing still loud in the dark.

“Now go to sleep,” Eddie said, pulling himself up so that he was beside Richie. “Go to sleep, ok?”

Richie nodded, safe in the soft cabin of their little ship, bobbing gently through the night.

They drove through Colorado and into Utah, through the conifers and the rocks. Eddie thought it looked like an alien planet that humans had only partially managed to terraform, the wild rock poking through the green surface.

The closer they got to the desert the more time Richie spent trying to tune the old radio, a black box slightly too small for the hole in the dash.

“This radio sucks,” Richie said with a huff one morning, shutting the thing off altogether.

Eddie shrugged. "You said you wanted a cheap rental, that's what you get for being a cheapskate.”

“Well, it sucks,” Richie said, crossing his arms.

Eddie laughed, small and low. “You need to take a break?”

Richie stuck out his lip, then smiled. “Yeah, man. I could go for a coffee.”

“Frisco’s coming up.”

Richie nodded, turning to look out at the long road.

They drove across the southern point of Nevada over two slow days, traversing that jagged shard of rock and dust with the static from the radio as their soundtrack. It crackled on even as Richie pressed his hand between Eddie’s legs, leaning over as they drove to growl obscene things in his ear. It was the white noise that played on as Richie jerked Eddie off in the back of the van, their bodies pressed close and hot.

In the day the desert had twisters that spiralled up from the ground, gold dust devils that wound their way around the van as they drove; their little blue box between the yellow sands.

The purple dusk descended each night and with each bright morning they stirred. They pissed in the shallow ditches at the side of the long roads and brushed their teeth with a rolled tube of toothpaste and bottles of gas station water.

They drove through towns as quick as they could, stopping to buy Fruit Roll-Ups and bags of nuts and cans of Yoo-hoo that got too warm in the back of the van. They’d eat a quick breakfast at a diner on those days, keeping their eyes averted from the people around them, trying their best to ignore their placid stares. Richie said that they were being watched even when there was no one around; he said he could feel eyes on him, against the backs of his thighs and around his neck, pressing against his extremities tight and constricting.

Eddie would nod, letting his eyes scan the dusty sky, before walking back to the van in silence.

Sometimes they would see lights in the night sky, too high for aircraft, and they’d speak about what you might see if you were looking down from four hundred kilometres up; the endless desert just a brown smudge, vast oceans nothing but a dark swatch of blue. Unseen figures like mites on skin, hidden among earthen pores, huddled around knots of electric lights spread out across the globe like neurons, surrounded by the glia of their rural spaces.

The radio finally crackled to life as they entered Death Valley. They had both jumped, staring at the black box of the radio as a gentle voice crackled out:

“The Arctic is lit by the midnight sun. The surface of the moon is lit by the face of the earth. Our little town is lit, too, by lights just above that we cannot explain.”

“That’s it,” Richie said gleefully, pointing at the radio and grinning wide at Eddie. “That’s the place!”

Eddie nodded, listening for a moment. “They’ve seen the lights too?” he said at last.

Richie beamed at him.

That night they saw the lights again, a blurred white set of points in the sky like a set of skittles; they spun down from above and chased along by the side of the van like a pod of dolphins leaping in the wake of a ship.

Richie and Eddie hollered, whooping as they watched them.

“Stop!” Richie shouted gleefully. “Stop the car!”

“No! No, no.” Eddie was smiling wide, his teeth white in the darkness.

The lights blazed, a sudden burst of blinding brilliance, and then they were gone.

**Author's Note:**

> If you've read this before in a different fandom, I apologise, couldn't resist reworking it for these soft boys (◕‿◕✿)


End file.
